Torture doesn't work. Film at 11.

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Ah, I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding, DR.

 

So apparently waterboarding KSM lead to stopping a 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles, according to the CIA:

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46949

I also found it interesting that only 3 detainees were ever subjected to waterboarding. I always thought the number was much higher.

 

dmc pretty well encapsulated my view.

What you wrote in response to T2 is not the same as what you wrote originally.

 

AM - I guess I don't get your point...as I still don't feel any sympathy for someone who is a cold-blooded murderer, like KSM. I didn't before posting either comment, and I still don't feel any after posting...I hope that's clear enough.

 

Three subjects were water boarded by the CIA, that the CIA admits. I would take that with a grain of salt. The inventory of Room 101 is larger than water boarding. Know that if you talk about water boarding you're merely talking about one torture technique in the US torture program. Just keep that in mind.

As for the grain of salt, there is this type of response - department A does something, department B does the same thing. People know of department A, ask about it and get information about department A only, but not the whole picture.

Same with Seymour Hersh's report that Cheney directly controlled a hit squad of Special Forces killing 'high value targets'. JSOC answered that the VP is not in the chain of command of JSOC. Does that say the story is not true? No, it doesn't say anything about any activities outside the chain of command of JSOC, so if the team was operating, say, under direct presidential direction (delegated to Cheney) instead of JSOC's, then the story still has not been refuted. I gather that America's torture program is a multifaceted and dispersed special access program as well.

As for the aspect 'torture works', just read the thoughts of Larry Johnson, a terrorism expert, on the matter. He doesn't mince words.

The matter of the obvious illegality of torture aside, the mantra that torture works' doesn't become true by virtue of repetition, even though the generation of an according public perception is the very point why the culprits are sticking to that particular meme/talking point. The corrosive implication of that argument is that the option is either torture or no information. That is not true. Worse, the assumption cannot be proven. You cannot prove that you wouldn't have gotten information had you not tortured. You can't prove negatives. But never mind that. Ill argued nonsense or not - it does have public appeal, doesn't it?

I find it disturbing that the Obama administration so far has been successful in resisting public pressure to prosecute the Bushmen for their (war-)crimes, namely, but not exclusively, torture. You don't enforce the law only when it is convenient - that's what the Bushmen did, and that approach manifested itself in patently illegal activities like the torture program, the wire tapping and so forth.

This is only aggravated by the fact, domestic US law aside, that a decision not to prosecute torture itself amounts to a breach of international law. The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, have in that treaty committed themselves to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court. In not doing that they violate this obligation.

 

KJ,

I would find a more credible, less partisan news source if I were you. The LA Library Tower plot was foiled in 2002. KSM was not captured until March 2003. That article is bunk.

 

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

So why was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed water boarded 183 times in March 2003, and Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002?

The answer appears to be this: The Cheney and Rumsfeld people firmly, fervently believed what others considered as false right from the start - the alleged ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. They knew that they were right, the absence of evidence notwithstanding. This report strongly suggests that the interrogators in the torture program were consequently pressured to extract information to support that particular assumption.

What is if you fear something that you cannot prove? Well, when you're in the position of executive power you have the means get results, to produce proof - through investigation, and if that fails, through pressure and coercion. Or by setting up a program of 'coercive interrogations', to use that euphemism. Considering their apparent efforts to destroy written evidence of dissent on torture within their own ranks, they were aware how questionable and unsound their case was legally.

That means that the Bushmen knew what they wanted to hear from those they subjected to torture. They wanted, needed confessions to vindicate themselves and their position, even more so with the preparations for the war on Iraq gaining momentum. And they went to great lengths to get what they wanted. That means torture was not only used but intended to extract confessions rather than for gathering intelligence, much less intelligence on ticking time bombs. That only confirms the point I made earlier about torture mainly being useful for generating confessions. With a confession from an Al Qaeda terrorist to have collaborated with Saddam's Iraq they would have had a very strong argument for the war - and finally produced the elusive (because imaginary) link that connected the different issues Al Qaeda and Iraq. They would have eventually silenced their critics. They would be vindicated. In particular, they needed this vindication to confirm their own fears.

In this context it becomes all the more apparent that the ticking time bomb babble is merely a sales pitch and a sham. Of course the Cheney crowd doesn't see it that way, after all they always knew they were right, righter than right. Well, I don't expect them to admit to the public and to themselves that they did something terrible while kidding themselves about the nature of what they were doing. In holding up the rhetoric device of the ticking time bomb scenario they can portray themselves (also to themselves) as virtuous and tough, when in fact they were just scared and projecting their nightmares, conspiracy theories and transformational dreams on their enemies, and when on their part there also was an undeniable element of ego involved in this. In many way the torture tells us a lot more about the US decision makers under Bush than about the terrorists.

That is even scarier as them having been cynically lying about the WMD's and Al Qaeda ties. They were caught in their self-amplifying ideological bubble from which they had systematically excluded the reality based community. They were sincere but delusional.

 

This timeline appeared this morning:

I don't get Cheney in all this. I know he was one of - if not the central figure - but I don't see where he has a constitutional role to craft this kind of policy. This should have been the president's decsion not Cheney's, or Rice's for that matter. It appears that some Democrats in Congress knew as well. No wonder hardly anyone wants to investigate:

What appears obvious is that a small circle of people concluded that it was "legal" and told everyone else who needed to know that it was fine and dandy. They have created a legal quicksand out of what should have been fairly easy, if they had stuck to the agreed upon international conventions in the first place.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30360314/

 

Chandos,
Cheney's role is easy to grasp. He got this extraordinary authority delegated from Bush under a personal agreement. It is that simple. Cheney was Bush's personal executive branch within the executive branch. That is, Cheney made those decisions, yes, but on Bush's behalf, who wanted his hands off this; doubtless a convenient arrangement for Bush.

The interesting question would be whether Bush under the constitution was allowed to delegate these decisions.

 

I know of very few presidential decisions that cannot be delegated. The executive branch has many responsibilities and the ultimate accountability lies with the president. There have been many cases in history where the president has specifically delegated authority and not wanted to be involved to provide plausable deniability (often used with intelligence operations).

 

Water Boarding Is Torture And A Crime +++ No Proof Torture Stopped Terror Attacks

There has been the view among the torturistas that torturing terrorists prevented terrorists attacks.

Not so, according to the CIA inspector general. In 2004 his office found that there was no conclusive proof that water boarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any specific imminent attacks, according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

Interestingly, when the CIA heads ordered that Abu Zubaydah be water boarded they found out that they had apparently overestimated his importance and knowledge. Even though he had been cooperative they believed he had more to say. Well, too bad he hadn't. Which put him an a poor situation to stop his torment when tortured - if he wouldn't, couldn't say anything - what does that mean, that he is a really tough nut and they'd have to increase the pressure? That he knew nothing? They wouldn't be sure until, say, the 183rd water boarding.*

Enter FBI agent Ali Soufan, the only Arabic-speaking agent in New York and one of only eight in the country, and who has since resigned from the FBI. Now that information on the subject of torture in terrorist interrogations has been declassified he is free to speak on how the CIA's 'rough interrogation' tactics were counter productive.

He's not the only one. The Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in 2002 warned the Pentagon's chief lawyer William J. Haynes II. that the application of extreme duress constitutes torture and warned that it would produce unreliable information.

The JPRA's assessment contrasted sharply with the assessment of SERE training psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who were in favour of such techniques - and who later formed a company that became a CIA contractor advising on interrogations. In this light one has to read Ali Soufan's line:

One has to take a business opportunity when one sees it I presume. From the Vanity Fair article Rohrschach and Awe:

Indeed. I'm curious how that story will turn out. It appears that the law enforcement people have been most prescient in their assessment of what the torturistas insisted was not torture.

To get back to the legal advice the Bush people gave - Steven G. Bradbury of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department assured the CIA that the water boarding was justified even if the prisoner turned out not to know as much as officials had thought. To George W. Bush’s Justice Department subjecting a person to the near-drowning of water boarding was not torture and thus not a crime.

This flies in the face of earlier assessments. In 1947, the US charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a US civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. In fact, in the Tokyo trials after WW-II the US sentenced to death and hung Japanese war criminals for using water torture on US POW. On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff was sentenced to ten years in prison; his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. And that was before Ronald Reagan signed the UN Convention Against Torture that was ratified by a Republican Congress in 1995, which means that before that date water boarding was a criminal offence under US domestic law already.

One marvels what Yoo, Bradbury, Haynes et Cie based their re-assessment on, and why they didn't bother mentioning any of the above cases in their pro-torture memoranda. Maybe it is as easy as this - unlimited executive power isn't worth its name when restrained by the law, so you have to creatively (i.e. selectively) make your case (as opposed to provide a neutral and factual assessment of the law) to meet that end.

Spoiler

* Never mind, he is a scumbag and deserved it anyway (which is 'sachfremd' ** and a private ex post justification, and never mind that, too).
** 'sachfremd' puts most succinct that it is a consideration that doesn't belong to the matter of torture in intelligence gathering, but that is, as I have said already, a consideration regarding punishment

 

Here is more along the same reasoning:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30399627/



The Republicans are circling the wagons around Cheney and the "old regime." The spin machine is in full spin cycle, since Holder has commented that the law was not a matter of convenience, to followed when the government found it suitable. Some are saying that the Democrats should play nice and that there should be renewed bi-partisanship.

Like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Project

And including Monicagate, trying to remove a sitting president over a denial of having sex. The government gave Ken Starr 40 million dollars to investigate a real estate deal, only to uncover an affiar. Nevertheless, we were told the "law was the law." Well, yes if you are a Democrat it seems, but if you are a corrupt Republican regime, there are many excuses.

A "banana republic?" WTF?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200904230033?f=h_latest

Then there is this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30388011/

Should the Democrats play nice? The Republicans would NOT - We know that from experience. They would go for everything they could get out of it politically. But that's just politics, and no one in government makes a decision regarding what's best for the country without considering the "political divide."

 

Some Puzzling ...

It appears that when the CIA applied water boarding and the entire arsenal of SERE derived severe interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects they never sought a rigorous assessment of whether the methods were effective or necessary. And then they continued it for seven years? I find that peculiar. They did not check whether it would work before they used it? Then it was a learning-on-the job field exercise, and the only basis for applying the 'techniques' was a faith in their effectiveness?

Maybe there is a better explanation for why torture was applied in the first place: I read that the CIA didn't have an apparatus and personnel for interrogating terrorists. Before 9/11 that has been the FBI's job (and they did a good job in that). When the first terrorists were interrogated in the black sites, they were providing a steady stream of information and reportedly Tenet was pleased, until he learned that it was the dreaded rival FBI and not his own CIA that interrogated the terrorists. When the 'harsh techniques' were introduced the FBI refused to participate because with good reason they understood those techniques to be illegal. With the FBI locked out - better: locking itself out - the CIA could and would claim all laurels from terrorist interrogations.

And if the price for that was to only whack around exhausted sources like Abu Zubaydah, and be really really sure they knew nothing, and in doing so win not only the turf war with the FBI but also get the ever persistent Cheneyites off their back who were breathing down his neck and who were hostile to the CIA - all the better. The Cheneyites had an interest in that solution because it offered a chance to validate the Al Qaeda-Iraq ties they asserted. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk. Also, it played into their 'unitary executive branch' game. Tenet must have known all that. Correspondingly, to ask for torture was a win-win solution for Tenet.

The turf war aspect offers a very compelling if banal explanation for why the CIA heads would ask for 'severe interrogation techniques'. It would fit the picture of Tenet as a supine person, under suspicion by the Cheneyites to be a soft Clinton leftover, and eager to impress. The psychologists Mitchell and Jessen were bringing up the stuff he needed, and conveniently also were the people he needed to lend torture a degree of academic credentials. Mitchell and Jessen had to form that company, apparently because they were working for the Pentagon's JPRA, who opposed the application of those techniques as torture. As a contractor they wouldn't be hobbled by such second guessing. For Tenets problems they were the 'quick fix' that could be used 'off the shelf', for a better salary. Banal indeed.

Well, if that's what it was - apparently the turf war they won. As for the quality of the information yielded by torture:

PS: As for the question why the effectiveness of torture was never evaluated, I get the impression that they kept applying 'aggressive techniques' because nobody dared to touch the issue. Apparently there was no (re-)assessment of the effectiveness of torture because they feared there could be a negative result from it. Not checking whether torture worked had considerable benefits to the Bush administration: What if the evaluation produced the result: "Torture doesn't work"? Well, gone is the utilitarian argument and gone is the ticking time bomb scenario - if it doesn't work, it also doesn't work preventing ticking time bomb from killing innocent lives. If it doesn't work it is just petty cruelty. It would wreck the torture memos necessity defence (if it doesn't work, it cannot be argued it was necessary) and thus revive the question about criminal conduct and ultimately prosecutions of policy makers in the Bush administration with new urgency. The question of whether torture works (not) is crucial, which is why it wasn't asked.

Also, risking to produce such a result would risk admitting mistakes, which under Cheney's philosophy something is you never, ever admit. Worse, had there been an evaluation of torture, with the probable negative result, that would be on the record. They could no longer claim ignorance. The people in positions of responsibility regarding the torture decision in the Bush administration would not contribute to their own political undoing. Better to let the political opponents do that, and retain the option to cynically accuse them of partisan retribution. Better still, they could continue claiming that torture did work, and treat the opposing view as a 'difference of opinion' in which both sides of the story are equally valid.

​

So, to preserve the image of them having been tough and ruthlessly effective in keeping America safe - they kept torturing, and contributed greatly to the titillation of the American right wing and the advancement of precedences for the doctrine of the unitary executive branch. What we see Cheney doing now is to continue to play that game, harping the theme that torture worked - which he could prove if only the Obama administration would only declassify the secret documents (that the Bush administration classified for some odd reason) supporting his (bold faced) assertion. Yeah right.

​

 

Here's a question:

Does the White House flying Air Force One escorted by 2 fighter jets over New York for some stupid photo-op that no one (even the President apparently, although if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you) knew about constitute torture? After all, it IS invoking an existing fear that I'd imagine most New Yorkers would have. Obviously it wasn't for information gathering, and from what I've gathered the people that did know about it knew it would cause panic, but went ahead with it anyways.

 

It was a 747, but it wasn't Air Force One. It was simulating a fighter jet accompanying a plane the size of Air Force One, but it wasn't Air Force One to my understanding. (Which makes for plausible deniability for the President to say he didn't know the Air Force was conducting that exercise.) As for the torture question - I'd have to look up the exact definition, but I was of the opinion that torture was based on inflicting pain or actual fear of dying. Like with waterboarding, it feels like your drowning, which combines both physical pain and the thought that you are dying. Unless the plane was coming directly towards a building you happened to be in, I don't see how seeing the plane would cause someone to think they were in imminent danger of their lives.

If this qualified as torture, we need put Sullenberger on trial (the pilot who landed his plane on the Hudson River), because certainly all of his passangers [edit]and all of the people who saw the plane going down in NYC [/edit]were at least as fearful for their lives as anyone in NYC during this exercise.

 

Wow, and here I was unable to conceive a response that didn't involve copious amounts of fire.

Aldeth, you truly are an inspiration.

 

Now come on KJ, apparently you wanted to say something else but didn't quite dare. Why so shy? Indulge us.

Or don't. It is clear enough. The implied equation doesn't add up. The first difference is control. It is one thing to scare to death or hurt many people. That happens in accidents all the time. It's quite another matter to have someone at your proverbial mercy, in restraints, and then intentionally hurt or scare to death that someone. The difference ought to be blatantly obvious to any sentient observer.

The second difference is about intent, and this is where your attempt falls even shorter: A roughly equivalent inversion of your implied argument is this little relativistic syllogism: Car accidents kill and maim people. Terrorists attacks kill and maim people. Accident drivers and terrorists are equivalent. Are they?

You need to try harder.

 

Probably not, but it might be some kind of minor offense. What kind of an offense is it when a motorist drives by you, making maximum noise, at 2 am?

 

OK, slightly new direction for the thread -- when does a rigorous yet legal interrogation turn into torture? One radio commentator here said he didn't want the only tool available to the interrogators to be "pretty please tell us what we need to know? We'll give you cupcakes!"

I agree with what he is saying in that those tasked with public safety need to be able to use effective methods in order to get important information. But where's the list of "OK" and "NOT OK" techniques? I get the feeling sometimes that there are bleeding hearts out there who don't want us to ever inflict any discomfort or emotional distress on anyone, even if it means millions will die. I can't abide by that sort of silliness, though I am also opposed to fingernail extraction, castration by means of a rusty saw, and other obvious tortures. But where do we draw the line?